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Gravity moves at speed of Light


GeminiinimeG

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You're not stating the entirety of the postulate. The speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames - if you observe a photon when you're travelling at 5km/sec or just standing still, then it will appear to be travelling at c.

 

so that means light does not experience time? But how can gravity affect time, could the use of gravity enable us to get rid of the annoying delay when communicating with people over large distances. If were abloe to find a way to surpass the speed of light or at least find out how to travel through time like light seems to do then it might be posible to communicate with lets say some one on jupiter with out delay. This kind of technology will be required when we are capable of travelling to space with a litle more ease.

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Travelling at significant fractions of the speed of light does cause time dilation, but this isn't useful in the way you imagine it to be because time only seems to travel more slowly for you, so, for example, it would seem to you that you'd only been gone a few days whereas to everyone back on Earth you would have been gone for decades.

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So we have to find a way to go faster than the speed of light? Didnt einstein say that the universe is bended by gravity or something like that, or was it another theorist? Well anyways if we were able to find exactly how this process works then maybe wed be able to send signlas through to another place in space or even time :confused:

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So we have to find a way to go faster than the speed of light? Didnt einstein say that the universe is bended by gravity or something like that, or was it another theorist? Well anyways if we were able to find exactly how this process works then maybe wed be able to send signlas through to another place in space or even time :confused:
I don't see how this works. The curvature of space-time won't make data travel faster than c.
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What do you mean by this?
That we won't be able to send signals faster than light to other places in space or time using gravity if gravity travels at the same speed as light.

 

I assumed this was what you were saying we should try to do.

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What I mean is if space bends then we should try and see were it bends and were it would take us, We would not be travelling faster than light but perhaps we wouldnt be 100 years older by the time we told other humans 100 light years away some kind of information, what owuld happen is space would bend in a certain place and our signals would get there in an instant

 

sent signal)-(Receiver

 

instead of

 

sent signal-----------------------receiver

you see if the signal was sent through a bent place in the fabric of space, it would take less time to travel there because your travelling less of a distance, basically your travelling one light year per say to get there through the so called worm hole insteadof 100 regular light years.

 

you would not be breaking any laws of physics or woudl you?

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Oh, if you're talking about wormholes, then yeah, you'd be able to travel instantaneously from one point to another within the confines of Relativity. It wouldn't strictly be faster than light travel, though, since you'd be travelling through a warped region of space at subluminal speeds, but the effect would be the same. If you wanted to preserve causality, though, you'd have to be careful about wormhole placement, and you'd still need to take one end of the wormhole to it's destination at slower than light speeds.

 

Of course, this is all entirely theoretical.

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Oh' date=' if you're talking about wormholes, then yeah, you'd be able to travel instantaneously from one point to another within the confines of Relativity. It wouldn't strictly be faster than light travel, though, since you'd be travelling through a warped region of space at subluminal speeds, but the effect would be the same. If you wanted to preserve causality, though, you'd have to be careful about wormhole placement, and you'd still need to take one end of the wormhole to it's destination at slower than light speeds.

 

Of course, this is all entirely theoretical.[/quote']

 

so according to the law of relativity if your travelling super fast your going through time at a lower speed, so going through the worm hole at top speed would mean your not gonna travel through time at all and people on both sides would actually be in sync would'nt they?

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If you went through a wormhole at close to the speed of light you'd still experience some slowing of time, but you wouldn't need to go through at anywhere near relativistic speeds - so yeah, people on both sides would be pretty much in sync, and if it could be done you could build quite an extensive network of wormholes, I assume, which would pretty neatly avoid the temporal distortions associated with "conventional" (if there was such a thing at the moment) interstellar travel.

 

 

(spelling edited)

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Good thing those mean people who insulted my intelligence left :mad:

Its not that I am an ignorant person its just I really havent studied this subject, I am smart but i get bored of stuf rather quickly, If i had the time id probably make thos guys cry by making em feel stupid ;)

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If you are referring to me then I've been gone for an hour, I'm allowed to have a life! And I didn't mean to offend you as such, more give you a dose of your own attitude.

 

Bending space-time (gravity) only makes the path that photons must pass longer. I'll explain, it's quite simple really. Take points A and B, you're sending data from A to B. The shortest path between them is a straight line. By increasing the gravity between A and B you are bending space-time, this would make the path between A and B a curve... A curve between 2 points will be a long path than a straight line between those 2 same points. Photons must travel along the lines of space-time. So if you do bend it then photons will follow that curvature.

 

btw, I have no problem with if you haven't studied, as long as you're willing to learn or at least be corrected then I'm cool with it!

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Oh, this just reminded me of something - if gravity travels at light speed, does anyone know if that would rule out the theorised possibilities for various forms of warp drive? I would think it would, since the idea seems to focus around riding a gravity wave at superluminal velocities, which presumably isn't possible if gravity propagates at the speed of light, but I could be wrong.

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If you are referring to me then I've been gone for an hour' date=' I'm allowed to have a life! And I didn't mean to offend you as such, more give you a dose of your own attitude.

 

Bending space-time (gravity) only makes the path that photons must pass longer. I'll explain, it's quite simple really. Take points A and B, you're sending data from A to B. The shortest path between them is a straight line. By increasing the gravity between A and B you are bending space-time, this would make the path between A and B a curve... A curve between 2 points will be a long path than a straight line between those 2 same points. Photons must travel along the lines of space-time. So if you do bend it then photons will follow that curvature.

 

btw, I have no problem with if you haven't studied, as long as you're willing to learn or at least be corrected then I'm cool with it![/quote']

 

I believe it is Einstein who said the shortest path between two points was not a straight line but rather it would be to bend space and time and you would be there in an instant or in such short time it wold appear an instant, so why did you say the photons would go around? I read somewere that photons take the shortest path and going around is not the shortest path :cool:

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I believe it is Einstein who said the shortest path between two points was not a straight line but rather it would be to bend space and time and you would be there in an instant or in such short time it wold appear an instant, so why did you say the photons would go around? I read somewere that photons take the shortest path and going around is not the shortest path :cool:

 

The shortest path locally or along a geodesic through the space-time metric which is shaped/affected by mass distributions (results in gravity).

 

An analogy would be a meandering river even though everyone knows that water flows "downhill".

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Like what J.C.MacSwell, the shortest path would be to follow the curvature of space-time, so if space-time is bent by gravity a photon would follow that curvature, this is the shortest path. It is not faster than light, c or anything which would break the laws of physics.

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Well something important came to mind, well not for todays humans but for future space explorers. If your only able to travel through space or through time, doesnt this pose a problem to people traveling at highspeeds to get somewere or people in orbit on a planet like pluto or far away. In order for them to stay in orbit they have to travel at a higher rate than people on earth, this means they will not be travelling through time as fast as we are, and the same goes for people exploring the inner parts of the system, they will be travelling through space slower but through time at a much higher rate. :eek:

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If anything, relativistic effects will be a benefit to future space explorers, because they'll be able to travel to distant stars in far less (apparent) time than it would otherwise take them.

 

 

so basically a lame attempt at trying to keep the current believed laws of physics intact
No. If light is going to exist inside gravity wells at all, it's going to have to conform to the shape of space, and since stars create pretty large gravitational dents, it would be surprising if there was any light at all. The space only seems curved if you look at it in 4-dimensions, and light in a 3-dimensional universe is not going to be able to travel in 4 dimensions.

 

You talk about the laws of physics like they're ethical trends. People aren't trying to force what goes on to fit current physical models, you know. As has been said before, the laws of physics are based on what we currently know about physics, so it's ridiculous to talk about "finding a way" to break them.

 

 

 

(Edited to add stuff, and because I kept misunderstanding the question. :rolleyes:)

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Well something important came to mind, well not for todays humans but for future space explorers. If your only able to travel through space or through time, doesnt this pose a problem to people traveling at highspeeds to get somewere or people in orbit on a planet like pluto or far away. In order for them to stay in orbit they have to travel at a higher rate than people on earth, this means they will not be travelling through time as fast as we are, and the same goes for people exploring the inner parts of the system, they will be travelling through space slower but through time at a much higher rate. :eek:

 

Pluto is slower than Earth is slower than Mercury.

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